Netanyahu's Oslo: Peace in the Slow Lane John Strawson
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soundings issue 8 Spring 1998 Netanyahu's Oslo: peace in the slow lane John Strawson John Strawson looks at the prospects for the Palestinian state. In November 1997, two years after the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Jew, posters appeared in Jerusalem depicting the current prime minister Benjamin ('Bibi') Netanyahu wearing the keyfir scarf, so loved by Yasser Arafat. The message was clear - Benjamin Netanyahu had joined Yitzhak Rabin as a traitor in the eyes a section of the Israeli right. Netanyahu's crime was to be planning to withdraw from another small tract of land in the occupied West Bank in line with Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians. While Netanyahu had been elected prime minister with the support of the right in May 1996 he had not been elected on a specifically anti-Oslo ticket. While he was no Rabin, Netanyahu has his own version of the famous agreement, which he has been slowly revealing to both the Palestinians and to his own electorate. Neither side are pleased with what they see, but Netanyahu does indeed have his own Oslo blueprint. The Oslo agreement When the Declaration of Principles (as the Oslo agreement is officially known1) was signed between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn September 13 1993, the intention was to create a framework for negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which would 49 Soundings lead to the end of the conflict. The Oslo accords were revolutionary in providing for the mutual recognition of the State of Israel and the PLO, ending thirty years of mutual denial. The agreement created a three stage process, first a transfer of powers from the Israeli occupation to the Palestinians in undefined territories in Gaza and the Jericho Area, then further Israeli withdrawals and Palestinian elections and finally negotiations which would clarify among other issues 'borders.' While the agreement broadly talked of the legitimate rights of both Palestinians and Israelis, the intention to discuss 'borders' appeared as code for self-determination. At the heart of Oslo was Israeli withdrawal from occupied Palestinian land. As such it struck a blow at the so-called 'national camp' of Israeli politics who viewed the Israeli 1967 occupation of the West Bank as a basis for territorial expansion of the state. Despite the popularity of the agreement amongst most Israelis, in large sections of the right it was seen as betrayal. Netanyahu, who had become leader of the opposition Likud Party in March 1993, initially opposed Oslo, and over the first years of its implementation was even seen in demonstrations against it. He even went along silently as others denounced Yitzhak Rabin as a traitor. Netanyahu was preparing himself for the first direct elections of an Israeli prime minister which were due in 1996. He realised more than the governing Labour-Meretz coalition that these new elections would be dependent on every single vote and that meant building a political coalition beyond the confines of the Israeli party system. Netanyahu set out to woo the extreme right, the religious constituency, the moderate secular right and the centrist voters who wanted Oslo but who worried about weakening Israel by making too many concessions or moving too quickly. By the time of Rabin's assassination in November 1995 Bibi was ahead in the opinion polls. By the time of the May 1996 elections, Shimon Peres, Rabin's successor, was busy casting himself in the role of military leader, which was his answer 1. There is no one Oslo agreement as such but four key texts: Israel-Palestine Liberation Organisation: Declaration on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, 13 September 1993 ('Oslo"); Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area, 4 May 1993 (the 'Cairo Agreement'); Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, 28 September 1995 ('Oslo 2'); Agreement on Hebron and the Note for the Record, January 1997- For an Israeli-Palestin academic exchange on the Oslo agreements, see Eugene Cotran and Chibli Mallat (eds), The Arab-Israeli Accords: Legal Perspectives, Kluwer International Law, 1996. 50 Netanyahu's Oslo to the Hamas suicide bombings in the streets of Israel's cities and to the Lebanese Hizbollah's attacks on the northern border. Peres, the man who had coined the phrase 'New Middle East', lost his script during the election and narrowly lost the election to Netanyahu. Bibi had quietly moved to the political centre after Rabin's assassination and refused to denounce Oslo; even more deftly his own manifesto promised to maintain 'all Israel's international agreements'. In interviews he promised that he would meet Arafat 'if it were in the interest of Israel's security'. He even changed track with his electoral slogan 'peace with security' - having assured himself of the religious vote and the right, Netanyahu went towards the centre. Whereas the Likud party declined in its Knesset (Parliament) vote and seats, Netanyahu, the candidate for the prime minister, won by a margin on 27,000 votes, about one half of one per cent. Bibi's solution Once in power Netanyahu set about reorganising the approach to the Palestinians. The Israeli left and many outside commentators saw him as the straight anti-Oslo candidate and missed the fact that he had moved towards combining Oslo with his own ideas about the future of Israel, which he advanced in his book, A Place Amongst the Nations: Israel and the World.2 Unlike the most of the right in Israel, Netanyahu understood that Oslo could not be unravelled as it had gone too far in establishing Palestinian facts on the ground. The establishment of the Palestinian Authority and the withdrawal of Israeli jurisdiction from the main population centres meant that the new Israeli prime minister confronted a half-born Palestinian state. Netanyahu thus set out on the road of containing this growing entity and ensuring that if a Palestinian state went to full term it would be the smallest and weakest possible. n his book, Netanyahu had spelt out his ideas on autonomy for the Palestinians. 'There is no reason,' he writes 'why every lonely cluster of Arab I houses should need to claim autonomy over the entire mountain on which it is perched. Thus autonomy is primarily applicable to urban centres in which an Arab population can make decisions on day to day life' (p 352). 2. Benjamin Netanyahu, A Place Amongst the Nations: Israel and the World, Bantam Press, 1993. 51 Soundings Netanyahu sees the Arab population as separate from the land on which they live. This continues the Zionist myth that the Palestinian population is unattached to the land on which they live both emotionally and legally. In this story the Palestinians do not have the identity of a normal people but possess a transitory and itinerant character. The peculiar identity of the Palestinians becomes a legitimating basis for the appropriation of their land and the establishment of Israeli settlements on it. If the Palestinians can be seen as separate from their land, autonomy becomes a matter of moving a population into the most convenient units for Israeli purposes. For Netanyahu this is underscored by the inherent terrorist threat which is posed by the Palestinians: 'To combat terrorism, Israeli military and security forces must have access to every part of the territory, including the urban centres from which the terrorists may strike and to which they may return for safe haven'. In this account the idea of autonomy is extremely limited and is based on the stereotype of an entire people as terrorists. Netanyahu's vision of the future of the Palestinians is based on locating the people in tiny territories and subject to Israeli security control. He argues that: It would be appropriate, therefore, to develop a system of four self-managing Arab counties: Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron. Each of these counties comprise a city and the small towns and villages adjacent to it. Together these counties encompass the great majority of the West Bank's Arab population, and they take up no more than one fifth of the land (p353). This convenient discovery that most Palestinians live in only about 20 per cent of the West Bank provides the basis for the territorial limitation, in an argument that is similar in tone to the old South African apartheid regime's view that the African population naturally belonged in the 'homeland' which then comprised some 13 per cent of South Africa. However, Netanyahu is willing to go further than Verwoerd as he speculates that 'if the Arabs were to demonstrate clearly that they had adopted a genuine peacetime footing, Israel could consider offering citizenship to the Arab population of Judea and Samaria at the end of a twenty year cooling off period.' 52 Netanyahu's Oslo Netanyahu in office Many journalists and analysts in the international media appeared to have missed reading this book which was published in the same year that Netanyahu became the leader of the Likud. Among many media commentaries it has been conventional wisdom to speculate that the problem with Netanyahu is that he does not know what to do with the peace process.3 However, a reading of his book is an instructive backdrop to his pronouncements and practices in office. Far from drifting, Netanyahu is engaged in implementing a well thought out plan. He has made this clear in a number of interviews and speeches where he explains that his policy towards the Palestinians is to 'lower expectations'. n the run up to the May 1996 elections, the result of secret meetings between Labour Cabinet Minister Yossi Beilin and Palestinian negotiator Abu Mazen, I including a map detailing the final settlement, were leaked to the press.